Over the past few months, I have explored 20th century new media by examining the works of several individuals from varying disciplines. I analyzed the writings of media ecologist Marshal Mcluhan, the video art of Bill Viola and the music of John Cage. I also looked at the work published by Rem Koolhaas and The Harvard Project On The City about architectural and urban mutations. This semester I took an interdisciplinary approach to new media studies by tying to familiarize and understand the work of experts and pioneers from four fields of personal interest. All of these sources have inspired me and influenced my studies. I have not only learned about new media but about the world and about myself.

According to McLuhan, all mediums can be classified as either "hot" or "cool". The main distinction between a hot or cold medium is the amount of information provided and the amount that is left for the audience to fill in. A hot, or high definition medium such as the radio or a film is dense in information and require less to be completed by viewer. A hot medium is low in participation, while a cool medium such as a cartoon or a telephone is high in participation, or required completion and therefore has a very different effect on the user. A telephone conversation for example, leaves much to be interpreted by the individual.

Another component of the documentary John Cage : The Works for Piano 7, looks at Cage's mysterious and celebrated painting Chess Pieces. The piece was purchased for one hundred dollars at a group show and until recently was being kept in private hands. Cage scholars had begun to doubt the pieces' existence. In this brief film, Margaret Leng Tan, along with a professor, analyze the sixty-four square chess board painting.

After the piece was tracked down and acquired, various individuals started to ponder whether the musical composition written on the board is in fact a playable piece. Chess Pieces was made in 1944; a very productive year musically and the year that Cage divorced his wife. The composition is in 2:2 time with no key signature or specified tempo. There isn't even an indication of a specific intended instrument. Meaning, the piece could be played with different instruments and even by two differnt musicians at the same time, since the two parts behave individually.

After being taught by Marcel Duchamp, Cage later became an avid chess player. This piece was perhaps the begining of his fascination with the game. The musical composition corresponds in many ways to a chess game. The composition is layed out over top of a duo tone grey chess board, with the notes in contrasting color--either black or white. Becuase little information is provided about the speed of the song, the lenght is open to the players interpretation. It is a fascinating creation. A piece that can be played, and or played on. When the piece was once again displayed, viewers were invited to witness the painting and hear the music at the same time.

In the first documentary on the DVD, John Cage : The Works for Piano 7, Margaret Leng Tan gives an in depth explaination of Cage's prepared piano technique. Tan was the first woman to graduate from the Julliard School with a doctorate in music. She worked with John Cage for the last eleven years of his life and today is hailed as the leading exponent of Cage’s music. The prepared piano technique involves inserting certain items between the strings on a piano in order to achieve unique sounds. Items such as pencil erasers and weather stripping can be used to mute a string or achieve a muffled sound, while screws and washers will produce certain percussive sounds. The sounds of Cage's prepared piano have been compared to that of a gamelan--an Indonesian ensemble of percussion tools. Margaret Leng Tan explains that the prepared piano technique originated from Cage's struggle to produce a wide array of sounds during a concert, but with a limited amount of space on the stage. In the documentary, Margaret Leng Tan spends the majority of the time demonstrating how one prepares a piano, noting Cage's meticulous instructions for how to do so. It takes almost the entire lenght of the film before the audience actually gets to hear the piano, but the final pay off is worth it. Cage succeeded; the piano preparations produce exquisite results.

"The Passing (1991)," by Bill Viola, is a fifty-four minute video piece shot in black and white. Eventhough a broken narrative and somewhat stream of conscious film, its themes are crystal clear. "The Passing is a personal response to the spiritual extremes of birth and death in the family," Bill Viola explains. He is referring to the birth of his son and death of his mother (to whom the film is dedicated), both of which occured in the four years prior to the making of this film.

The film opens up with a shot of complete darkeness. Slowly lights begin to twinkle and shine through the black nothingness as the camera begins to pull out. After a few moments the the grainy videotape footage begins to reveal what appears to be clouds in the night sky. The shot then fades into a close up of a man's face, specifically his blinking eye, laying horizontal. Viola later elaborates on this scene, frequently returning to a man (Viola himself) being awakened by his unsettling dreams and struggling to sleep through the night. The third shot of the film shows a figure suspened in water, clothes swaying ( a visual theme commonly used by Viola). We then emerge from the water as the camera follows Viola's son from behind as he happily runs from the ocean down the shore. The camera is positioned low--at the hight of the infant child, creating an intersting, almost voyeuristic perspective.

The rest of the film continues to juxtapose the human body with the natural world, exploring the meaning of life and our relationship with the universe. Bill Viola uses transitions and plays with the lights and shadows to convey the dreamlike imagery in "The Passing." The distressed man tosses and turns in bed, as he dreams of wandering in vast desert landscapes and being stranded in ominous bodies of water, occasionaly waking to check the clock or drink a glass of water. The only audio in the film is a loud ambient sound and distorted heavy breathing.

"The Passing" is about lonliness and spirituality. It is about life, death and everything in between.

According to the Roman Operating System there are four main elements that you will need to understand for the building, proliferation and networking of a city:
1. The city is comprised of standardized parts arranged on a matrix. These parts are the standard equiptment included in the container of each city and are easily identifiable.
2. The city is organized according to a series of general principles which are socially, culturally and politically determined, and in most cases are manifested in clear architectural and urban examples.
3. The city is the relationship of constantly chnaging flows superimposed onto a generic template.
4. You will have the ability to customize your city according to local topographical, climactic or cultural conditions.

For all its apparent complexity, once you know the rules, a city is easy to build.

--Taken from Mutations by the Harvard Project On The City--

In the essay Telegram From Nowhere, Mckenzie Wark discusses the issues of globalization and how it is effecting the privacy of individuals. She begins by defining globalization as "the struggle between metropolitan centers to distort the growth of contact between people to benefit themselves." Essentially history is the progress of globalization. History is about space, not time. Wark goes on to assert that the only thing that has chnaged over time is the speed of globalization. She notes the invention of the telegraph as the single most important communication revolution. Since then, information has traveled faster than humans, goods or armies. The telegraph marks the beginning of the end so to speak.

It marked the end of architecture in the classic sense that building are used for enclosure--a boundary in which things can be rationally ordered. Today, with so much information travleing in and out of the home, office, etc., it is impossible to monitor all of it. Architetcure is no longer about privacy. It simply holds ones personal posessions and keep you dry from the rain.

So how can this information be controlled? Telethesia, or "perception at a distance," makes possible, reason without enclosure. It enables the monitoring of movement, and things while they move. In a sense, Wark says, "the communication engineers have become the architects."

http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/oan/

This was briefly mentioned in an article in the NY Times today.

It is a database of public-domain architectural designs
intended for use by disaster victims & people in impoverished countries.

The website's scheduled launch date is March 8th,
and it should be interesting to watch its development
as designs are contributed over the upcoming weeks.

I think it has the potential to become a powerful collaboration tool,
as well as a great new medium for distributing ideas about architecture
over the web.

The Medium Is The Massage: An Inventory Of Effects, was published in 1967 as somwhat of an addendum to McLuhans seminal, essay, The Medium Is The Message. Much like the documentary on the media ecologist, the 160 page experimental book is a, "collide-o-scopic journey through the Marshal Mcluhan looking glass."

The book was created by McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore. It is somewhat of a collage style pamphlet, with text dispersed and superimposed throughout, intertwined with the obscure imagery. Although more or a poetic and esoteric work of art, The Medium Is The Message is a brilliant philosophical work. More so, the book reveals frightening insight into mass media, consumer goods, the press, advertising, and the arts because it was written nearly twenty years before the conception of the internet. Sometimes deamed as a prophet, Marshal McLuhans studies must have seemed incomprehensible to readers during his career. Nearly five decades later, his observations are more accurate and remarkably clear then ever.